¿ARE YOU BLOCKING LOVE?

5 STEPS TO OPEN UP.

1. Practice receiving small bursts of love, like compliments or random acts of kindness.

We’ve all done the dance when someone gives us a compliment to push the energy somewhere else. At our best we say ‘Thank you” without fully receiving the love, and at our worst we discount the compliment, “Oh, this old thing? Had it for years.” Or we say, “No, thank you” to a stranger who offered to do some small favor for us – like lift our luggage, let us go ahead in line, carry a bag, etc. These are all instances of blocking love.

Reject love in small ways, and you block it in big ways. My friend Marci Shimoff, author of Love for No Reason, says it takes 20 seconds to fully receive a compliment. To increase your love quotient, when someone gives you a compliment, say “Thank you” and add on to it with what you love about what they’ve complimented you on. And next time someone offers to help you, say “YES! Thank you.” And receive the love.

2. Start with Self-Love.

When you love yourself, no one can take love away from you. And the more you love yourself, the more love you will naturally attract in your life. So take a vow, or several, of self-love. A good one to start with is, “I promise to give myself unconditional love and respect, always.” In my first book, Choosing ME before WE, I included the 5 vows of self love I originally took with myself – there is a chapter on each. You can also download the free Self-love Kit I created at www.ChooseSelfLove.com.

3. Smile at strangers.

Practice giving small bursts of love and letting that love in by smiling at strangers. Sometimes they will smile back and sometimes they won’t. Of course, when they smile back, it will feel good. Stay with the smile and literally feel your heart open to receive the love, melting layers of protection. But even when the strangers don’t smile back you can increase your love quotient by staying with your smile, in your heart and redirecting that love to yourself so that the love feeling doesn’t go away. Each time you smile at someone and they don’t return the smile, you have an opportunity to teach your heart that you won’t die or feel utterly rejected if love isn’t returned from another.

4. Create close, healthy connections with multiple people of your same gender & get real.

Women with women. Men with men. This is about opening up your heart to forming close, intimate and deep bonds – not just based on a shared history or because of shared work or child situations, but based on really revealing and seeing each other for who you truly are. Intimacy = Into Me See.

I meet so many women (and I was one, too) who don’t have the level of deep and vast love in their lives they crave because they don’t have deep, intimate connections with other women. They may have lots of friends, but those friendships are not the deeply vulnerable kind. They may even have one or two BFFs that they let mostly in, but they wouldn’t be caught dead in a group of other women sharing openly and vulnerably. Taking part in sacred circles with other women will give your love quotient a HUGE quantum leap, because your heart will learn to trust again in ways it can only do with other women.

5. Identify your form of protection & let it go.

What is your form of heart protection? Have you hidden your heart away in some obscure location for safe keeping, built walls like Fort Knox to keep out intruders, or even let her shrivel up to seemingly fake death? When you can identify your mode of protection, you can start working on letting them go. Take a journaling or visualization adventure to find what is holding your heart hostage. Ask yourself questions like, “What is keeping my heart protected?” “What have been the incidents in my life that have caused me to protect my heart?” “What is my heart afraid of?”

I’ve worked with clients who have rescued their hearts from refrigerators in the forest, uncovered them through layers of death shrouds, unlocked layers of steel walls, all kinds of wild adventures. Once you find what’s keeping your heart protected, thank the protection for it’s service and imagine taking your heart back by putting it in a safe place inside of you.

As you work to increase your love quotient using some of the suggestions listed above, come back and check in on your heart protection and see the progress you are making in letting your heart, and yourself, out of captivity to be free to receive love fully!

 SOURCE: INTENT BLOG

6 LESSONS KANYE WEST TEACH US ANYTHING ABOUT HIGH SELF-ESTEEM

These days when you see Kanye West‘s name in the headlines you automatically expect a story about him throwing a temper tantrum at paparazzi, saying something politically incorrect in an interview or tabloid gossip about his girlfriend/reality star Kim Khardashian. It’s true that Kanye West’s antics often detract from the power of the things he is saying, but rest assured he’s saying something you should listen to. Regardless of your personal opinion of Kanye, these six lessons are important to take note of for any artist, minority, or person trying to overcome the odds and make a difference.

1.  Don’t sell yourself short – “If I didn’t call myself a genius, I’d be lying to all of you and myself,” Kanye says in an earlier part of the interview. At first listen that is possibly the most arrogant statement, but it proves that Kanye has the utmost faith himself. Take note. If you know you have an ability or a gift to offer the world, don’t wait for someone else to acknowledge it before you embrace it for yourself. You don’t have that kind of time. Embrace your gift and work at it. “I spent 10,000 hours at this, I’ve been working at it my whole life,” Kanye explains. When you put that much effort into something, you don’t have to be humble about it. When you take notice of yourself, everyone else takes notice too.

2. Don’t limit yourself to one label or category – As human beings we naturally contain multitudes of passions and talents. Don’t force yourself into one small labeled box. If you love art and music, don’t think that you only have to pursue one – that your ideas only can come from one place. Kanye’s battle comes from his frustration of trying to break into couture fashion but not getting the respect he wants as a designer because he became famous as a rapper. His message here is clear: people are going to try and tell you that you can’t do something simply because you come from a different world. They’re wrong. If the passion and the work is there, your ideas are valid no matter what your primary “occupation” or “title” is. Don’t be afraid to go after everything if that’s what you want.

3. Protect your dreams – The world is full of naysayers, unfortunately. We are not advocating that you attack those naysayers with curse words and violence as Kanye has been known to do, but we do advocate not allowing someone to make you shelve something you believe in. You have to build a wall around those dreams, around your heart that protects it from people saying you can’t do something. Don’t believe people who tell you that your idea is stupid or you should do something else. Use your voice and speak up, even if everyone around you is telling you to be quiet. That’s how you are heard.

4.   Don’t try to fit the mold – This is similar to the last lesson but Kanye nails it a few minutes in when he says, “I refuse to follow those rules where society is set up to control people with low self-esteem – through improper information, with branding and marketing.” We are bombarded by images every day that tell us the “right” way to look and to act and we compare ourselves to these mainstream images. We get conned into thinking that if we don’t fit into that mold that we are doing something wrong, and by allowing ourselves to feel low we are allowing the projectors of those images to climb higher on our backs. Stop the cycle. Get the right information you need to empower yourself. You don’t have to stay down there – there’s enough sun for everyone. You just have to be bold enough to stand up and see for yourself.

5. Have heroes to aspire to  – Kanye quotes Steve Jobs, Michaelangelo and Jesus as a few of his heroes. He honestly, deep in his bones, believes he has the power to make the same impact as these legends. You should too. Find people who inspire you to be better. Look up to them and make a conscious effort to climb to their level, otherwise what’s the point? We may not reach the level of the pedestal we put them on but Heroes inspire us to reach and push farther than we could on our own.

6. Set the expectation for mutual respect – Once you’ve convinced yourself that you are a person with a voice and something worth saying, then you have to convince everyone else as well. You do that through respect – you set the expectation that as a person of value (ie, a person period) you deserve a certain level of respect. This means you stand up for yourself when someone falls below that line of respect, but it also means that you treat others with the level of respect you expect them to give you (admittedly, Kanye has some work to do on this last part, at least in public).

SOURCE: INTENT BLOG